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Published: February 11th 2009
You looking at me?
Preveen has a smile for everybodyCompared to the amount of free time we had at BGM, life at Divine Children's Home (DCH) was quite the opposite.
Since we arrived at lunchtime on Monday 19th and, for the first week we had 2 hours a day off at most (and that spent in an internet cafe). We arrived at a moment of colossal change for everyone at DCH the biggest being the physical move. They have come from a house where children sat, studied, prayed ate and played in one room on the floor; where they slept 15 to an average sized bedroom, on the floor.
Their new home is purpose built on 3 floors with wide staircases at either end of the building. Their dormitories hold 20 bunk beds each (boys and girls) they have separate study rooms and a library; they have a large dining area with chairs and tables and a kitchen the size of the ground floor of their former home.
When you visit the bedrooms you notice the beds are pulled together, some are without mattresses, some girls still sleep 2 to a bed, all signifying the children's attempts to reconcile the changes going on around them. They still need the
DCH
Front entrance security of being close to each other of hearing the nocturnal sounds of their brothers and sisters sleeping should they wake and find themselves in these great caverns of rooms.
Most of the children are at school all day coming home at 4.00 leaving just 2 at home to be looked after by the Ayers (ladies who cook, clean etc). Our en suite room is on the first floor and larger than most rooms we have stayed in so far (Neyyardam excepted!). On the same floor there is the library, although the sign on the door says Computer Lab, and this is the first room we worked on.
We had a meeting with Alice the founder of DCH when we arrived and offered to help unpack as well as teaching, the offer was warmly accepted and this task has taken up 90% of our time since we've been here. The library was full of sacks of books and boxes of toys and games together with bags of clothes and shoes, we set about rescuing all the text books we could find and reuniting games and toys. We were introduced to Green House, a dormitory sized room upstairs that was
Library
Transformed from store room strewn with even more stuff including more than 20 waist high sacks of clothes and half a dozen sacks of new exercise books.
By Friday the library looked studious with books lined up, toys and games in boxes and nets, posters on the wall, chairs and benches in place and a rudimentary blackboard consisting of a sheet of black PVC stapled top and bottom to pieces of rough softwood hanging from a nail.
We reorganised the green house dormitory with resources (pencils, pens, colouring pens and pencils, crayons, rubbers, rulers and exercise books) stacked in cupboards and clothes, materials toys and games stacked separately and easy to get at.
Our first thought on seeing the huge amount of resources was that the kids were incredibly well off compared to the children in Neyyardam, however when you break it down amongst 30 kids and then look ahead to Alice's projection of a 100 child capacity then you start to see that these resources will only last for a short while until they will need replenishing.
Even the sacks of clothes when divided by 30 children equated to much less than half of the clothes we packed and unpacked every time
Kartig
One of Sue's success stories we moved with our 3 children it's just a matter of scale.
We agreed a study time of 6.00 - 7.00 each evening as prayers are at 7.15 and there is the regular power cut from 8.00 - 8.30. We split the students into 2 groups with Sue electing to teach the younger ones and me taking the older kids with an added brief of assessing their level and suggesting a programme to move them forward.
Sue got the short straw as she found she had to run around after the pre schoolers to keep them under control as well as trying to keep the school aged ones engaged, she finished her first hour like the end of a hard workout at the gym.
My group performed well and I finished the class and wandered back to our room with an air of serenity that was swiftly dispelled by a look from Sue that wiped the smile off my face before she turned, walked into the bathroom, closed the door and had a shower.
Children in India don't start learning English until 3rd grade and Sue had mostly younger ones in her group; I had decided to split my
Usual suspects
Paper plate and lolly stick frolics!! group into 2 based on their reading ability, so we have now decided to run 2 classes and work together in both.
We had an afternoon off on Saturday and went to a festival held in the palace grounds. There were craft stalls, music performances, Kathakali dancers and food stalls. We spent a very pleasant evening wandering around and ate some lovely seafood. We even bumped into people we knew; a young guy who comes to DCH to help on occasional evenings and a group of Italian street performers who are here studying local martial arts, dance and gymnastics who we met on our first walk along the street past DCH. We felt quite at home and rounded that feeling off with haggling a cheap price with the Riksha driver for our ride home, although we probably still ended up paying twice what a local would expect to pay.
Our second week sped by, we were still busy but the children were at home on Monday for Republic Day and we went out to do some sightseeing on Wednesday. We were trying to put some work together for the children to carry on with after we left; nipping
Girlfriends
Sue's posse up and down to the internet (20 rupees each way in a riksha-about 10 minutes drive) each day so it was Friday before we knew where we were.
Friday started with a dense fog at 7.00 and when it started to clear we headed by bus for Kovalam and the beach, mainly to exchange books as we had finished Shantaram and Angela's Ashes. Books have become a 2nd currency while travelling and when I found a book on the train on the way from Goa (Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams) I kept it and carried it around waiting for the chance to sell or exchange it for something I wanted to read,
To be on the beach paddling in the sea again was a great feeling and it was hard to imagine we had spent 3 weeks doing just that only a month ago (and Mike and Tracy were still living on the beach!!) Sue was hungry for western food with burger in mind but lunch was disappointing and expensive as usual; you crave western food after a while but there are few places that can actually reproduce it.
When we were sightseeing on Wednesday we ate lunch in a local
Christopher
Another of Sue's super stars vegetarian restaurant; Sue had Masala Dhosa (crepe like pancake folded and filled with potatoes, onions and spices) and I had 2 parottas (a flat bread made with precoiled dough) served with 2 bowls of dips. We finished this off with 2 small tubs of ice cream and still spent less than £1 compared to more than £5 for western food on Friday!
Saturday morning I decided to see if I could meet up with our Italian neighbours again; I eventually found them sparring in a small dirt floored gym (Kalari) behind their Kalarippayat (Keralan martial art) instructors house.
Their dedication is incredible, they are in the gym for 3 or 4 hours a day and the heat and humidity must make the hard work they put in really punishing.
I went looking for a favour, some entertainment for the children as a kind of farewell gesture from us. Joseph their leader explained they had a performance that evening at a temple and they were due to fly back to Italy on Tuesday morning at 5.00 am. Nevertheless they promised to come to DCH at 4.00 on Monday and do something for the children, it was a measure of
their heart and generosity; we in turn promised to come to the temple that evening and watch the performances.
The temple was tucked away up tiny streets that even the riksha had trouble negotiating but we were soon walking along alleyways lit with strip lights and adorned with floral tributes dotted regularly with big pairs of speakers with music blaring out. If there's something going on at the temple the whole neighbourhood joins in, they have no choice. You couldn't get lost you just followed the music and the speaker cables.
There was an impromptu stage set up behind the temple and we watched a lady with a green face sing a Kathakali folk song that lasted an hour, after her impressive performance we were entertained by groups of youngsters performing dance routines to popular tunes and a traditional Punjabi dance performed by 2 of the Italian girls resplendent in costume with bejeweled faces. Joseph had said they would perform at 8.00 but in true Indian tradition they still had not got onto the stage by the time we had to leave at 10.00.
However, promptly at 4.00 on Monday the troupe arrived and
Trivandrum temple
Intricate Hindu craftsmanship after an improvised comedy magic, juggling and acrobatics routine that had the children giggling they produced balloons and proceeded to model them one for each child.
The noise level went up accordingly with squeals of delight accompanied by regular explosions as the colourfull rubber animals burst under pressure, then after their performance they left the kids a bag of tennis balls and tennis ball practice poys.
The evening and next few days turned out to be quite traumatic as we tried to arrange a flight for our daughter George to come over and Murphy's law came into play when snow closed the India visa office in Hayes with George's visa inside. All was resolved though and we managed to get her a flight to Trivandrum landing on Friday morning. We collected George at 4.00 am which meant she had time to meet the children before we had to leave. It was hard to say goodbye to them and we lingered chatting to them and taking more photos; but the time soon came and as they sat down to lunch we drove away.
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Trace and Mike
non-member comment
Lifes a beach!!
Hi you two and GEORGE! How great that you are here. Sorry we've been a bit lapse in our correspondence (very lapse really!!!) but you know how hectic things can be here on the beach in Goa!! But we are fine and miss our next door neighbours. Sundowner drinks are not the same now!!! We only have 3 days left till Blighty so please think of us in the freezing cold! Sounds like you are still having an amazing time. Happy and safe travels and will get in touch when we get to Scotland. Big love to you all and have a great time George. Love ya lots from the Groupie and half of the Bongo Brothers!!! xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx